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Saturday, July 17, 2010

The 100,000 year climate cycle

For all those global warming alarmists, one thing you probably should check out is the long term ice core data from Vostok Research Station in Antarctica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg

While global warming data has been concentrating on the relatively recent time period, what the ice core data shows is a repeated cycle approximately every 100,000 years where temperature rapidly rises and then gradually falls. We are near the peak of one such cycle. What does this mean? It means that we may be attributing human influence as having far more effect on global temperature than it actually does, and there are factors like the eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the earth orbit which overshadow anything humans could do to either change global temperature or attempt to keep the same. Because we are near the peak of a cycle, global temperature trend will either continue to rise for a couple thousand years on average no matter what we do or it could start the gradual cooling down for the next 100,000 years. What this means is that we need to put our egos in check and instead of wasting time and resources trying to keep the climate from changing, we need to prepare for when it changes, and it will change.